This is BASIC — my Lagotto Romagnolo. Official lake8.dev mascot and uptime monitor. He also finds truffles. 😍

Here's my "cloud infrastructure" Air conditioning — NO Sterile environment — NO Dedicated server room — NO Enterprise-grade monitoring — is BASIC (BASIC is my Lagotto Romagnolo. He checks uptime personally.)

Ciao! I'm Italian 🇮🇹 — my English is very "pasta asciutta" level. I use AI to help me write without saying something cosmically wrong. Sorry for that. But me and my dog are 100% real. 🐕

He's a Lagotto Romagnolo — a breed selected for centuries specifically for truffle hunting. It's literally in his DNA. Training starts as a puppy: you hide small pieces of truffle in the garden and let him find them. Now the only way to make him truly happy is to let him run free in the woods — and you run behind him 😄 When he finds one, he expects a proper reward. I'm from Bologna, so his payment is a tortellino per truffle. Fair trade. 😁

Thk 😀

Ah, yeah, we don’t like Google here either. Ciao! At this rate I'll have to rewrite everything in carrier pigeons. :-)

Ciao, messaggio ricevuto. La prossima volta preparerò il post appositamente per te. Se mi mandi le specifiche IEEE ti prometto che farò del mio meglio per rispettarle. Buona serata.

Deal! Work hard, find truffles, get tortellini con burro e tartufo. Best salary package in the industry. 😀

Inbound: sender → port 587 → Postfix → Dovecot → Roundcube Outbound: Postfix → Brevo relay → recipient Thk

Ciao! I'm Italian — my English is not exactly my strongest skill. But if AI-assisted translation bothers you, I can always switch to Google Translate 😊 Hope that's reassuring enough.

Ha, thanks! To be fair — I've been writing code since 1995, and doing industrial software for the last 21 years. So not exactly a beginner. The self-hosted infrastructure side was genuinely new territory though, and yes, a lot came together quickly. "Git sum" is going on the wall. 😄

Exactly. I didn't move to the cloud. The cloud moved to my living room.

Buona domanda. Onestamente il nostro setup di logging è semplice per design — niente syslog centralizzato, niente aggregazione remota. Tutto resta locale sul Pi: log nginx in /srv/logs/, log applicazioni via Docker, log di sistema via journald. Niente lascia la macchina tranne quello che spingiamo esplicitamente (statistiche giornaliere verso la dashboard pubblica via scp). L'aspetto privacy che citi è interessante — noi non abbiamo la preoccupazione della "privacy domestica" perché il Pi È il server, ma il principio di tenere i log locali lo condividiamo. Niente Elastic, niente Loki, niente syslog remoto. HAProxy sull'Orange Pi Zero 3 ha i suoi log locali separati — non li spediamo al Pi. Due nodi, due store di log indipendenti. Non è architetturato per la scala. È architetturato per semplicità e controllo — che per una software house di una persona è il tradeoff giusto. E grazie per il commento sulla ridondanza — fingere che un Pi singolo sia highly available sarebbe stato imbarazzante. Non lo è. Funziona abbastanza bene, e sapere dov'è il punto di failure conta più che fingere che non esista.

also, if someone have a technical article or white paper and want to share - we have a contribute page on https://lake8.dev/contribute/contribute/ how it works: you send, we read, we write back with technical notes (good and bad, honest). if you ok with feedback we publish. if not, no problem, we delete. is free, is honest, no marketing 🐕 https://lake8.dev/contribute/contribute/

You're right, and that's a fair criticism. I'll use a plain translator next time. Thanks for pushing back on it.

Honestly no — I didn't feel it at all. The Pi was handling the spike silently in the background while I was working normally. Upload bandwidth on Eolo is 100Mbps, and a static Astro site serving mostly HTML/CSS is incredibly light. Peak day was 555 human visitors with 9.98MB total bandwidth — that's nothing for a residential connection. The Cloudflare tunnel approach is smart especially without a static IP. We have a static IP included with Eolo (unusual for residential, I know) which simplifies things. For DDoS protection we rely on HAProxy on a separate Orange Pi Zero 3 doing rate limiting and our dynamic blocklist — but honestly at our scale a proper DDoS would still hurt. The "who knows about the future" concern about Cloudflare is real though. Building on free tiers of centralized services is convenient until it isn't — which is part of why we went full self-hosted in the first place.

Ha! That's actually quite meta — you used Claude to understand a post that was partially written with Claude's help. Welcome to 2026, where AI reads infrastructure posts so humans don't have to. 😄 Glad the setup is impressive even through the translation layer. If you have any specific questions, ask away — I'll try to answer in plain English this time

You're completely right, and thank you for saying it directly. Let me try again in plain English: I run a small software company from home. Instead of paying €50-100/month for hosting, email, and analytics services, I built everything on a €60 Raspberry Pi computer sitting next to my router. What's actually running on it:

The website you're reading about (like any website, just hosted at home instead of on AWS) Email — when someone writes to info@lake8.dev, it lands on that Pi Analytics — that world map showing where visitors come from

That's it. Three things, one small computer, zero monthly fees. There's also a green angle that rarely gets mentioned: the entire setup draws around 3-4W idle — less than a LED light bulb. A data center rack serving the same traffic would consume orders of magnitude more. Self-hosting at this scale isn't just cheaper, it's genuinely lighter on the planet. The complexity you're seeing is real — it took months to set up and I have 20+ years of experience. I'm not going to pretend it's for everyone. It isn't. But that's also why I built Lagotto BI — our actual product — which does the opposite: takes complex business data and makes it readable for people who just want to understand their business, not manage servers. So yes, "software house" is my small business. The Pi is just how I run the infrastructure behind it without paying cloud prices forever. Thanks for the honest feedback — it's genuinely useful. thk :-)

My dog and I […]” is proper English grammar.

It’s impolite for you to be first in the list of beings. “Me is 100% real” is wrong, it’s “I am […]” Your AI needs a grammar upgrade. 😉 thk :-) Grammar noted and appreciated! My dog and I are 100% real. BASIC would have caught that error, but he was busy finding truffles. :-)

Ciao! Thank you — happy to be here. The mess feels familiar, honestly. My server room looks exactly the same. 😄 Looking forward to sharing more — there's plenty of journey still ahead.